


The Tongueless Bell

by black_lodge



Category: El Laberinto del Fauno | Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Child Abuse, Dark, F/M, Menstruation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-10 01:22:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_lodge/pseuds/black_lodge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"In the future she will wonder when exactly she lost herself to the depths of this man. Was it when he struck her, standing outside in the rain with a heart full of salt? Or did she become something not her own when she first laid eyes on him, like those who fought Medusa and fell with a single naked glance at those serpentine eyes?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tongueless Bell

**Author's Note:**

> Reader be warned: this is dark, unpleasant, and painful. Posted originally on LJ, June 2007.

_Your spirit shall forever remain among the humans. You shall age like them, you shall die like them, and all memory of you shall fade in time._ – the Faun

 _Soon you’ll see that life is not like fairy tales. The world is a cruel place, and you’ll learn that, even if it hurts._ – Carmen

~*~*~*~

In the future she will wonder when exactly she lost herself to the depths of this man. Was it when he struck her, standing outside in the rain with a heart full of salt? Or did she become something not her own when she first laid eyes on him, like those who fought Medusa and fell with a single naked glance at those serpentine eyes?

She does not know what to think, except that perhaps she never was her own to begin with.

~*~*~*~

_Ofelia. Ofelia._

_Ofelia, I’m leaving tonight._

Slow ascent into consciousness; dark-haired Mercedes’ words register slowly. Ofelia’s eyes feel gummy. _Where to?_

_I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you –_

Sleep has left her mind cobwebbed and Mercedes’ anxiety worms through her; sweat breaks out over her entire body suddenly. She twists in her sheets. _Take me with you._

 _No, no. I can’t._ Over protests – _I can’t, my child. But I’ll come back for you, I promise._

Promise. What are the promises of an adult? Her mother had promised, and look now where she was; a hillock of naked earth in the cemetery. _No, no_ – she protests, and Mercedes takes her into her arms, but briefly.

_Take me with you. Oh, take me with you._

 

She stands in the thunderstorm, eyes on the spot where the woman disappeared alone in the dark of the storm. In the shadows, she can only distinguish her tears from the rain by the hot trails they leave on her cheeks.

A large hand on her shoulder, spinning her round. She cannot suppress a cry.

_What are you doing?_ Dawning realization; she can see it rising in his eyes like the red sun on a terrible day. _Where is she? Which way did she go?_  
Ofelia can only tremble. He strikes her, hard, across the face; she sprawls into the mud. She sees his boots leave, and when she brings herself to her feet, she can hear the noise of booted feet racing back and forth across the yard, of guns being prepared.

She sobs and runs to her chamber.

 

The piece of chalk lies on the bedside table. In desperation she seizes it and marks a sloppy rectangle on the wall, but nothing happens. She tries the floor, forcing herself to move slowly, to form the square well, but still, the wooden planks remain as they have always been. The chalk breaks in her grip; she flings it at the wall, resisting the urge to howl.

 

Gunfire echoes through the hills all night. She dares not run, dares not be caught in the crossfire. She will not leave without her brother; she will not risk his life for her own. 

When the sun at last rises over that bloody land, it is a new day.

As the sun creeps through her windows, the captain appears at her door, babe in arms, silently gazing at her ruination. He is a mess, but a triumphant one; even the cut and the bruises on his head seem to cry victory. He jiggles the cooing child, smiles at its contented gurgle, and leaves her there, not bothering to address her or even lock her in.

No matter. She has nowhere to go.

~*~*~*~

He has the freedom to do anything he wishes, yet he chooses to send her to school.

It is a hard boarding school in western Spain, surrounded by rolling fields and silence. That first year she sees little of anyone important to her. She makes no friends. Of the many mediocre students she is the drabbest; she wears her mourning in her eyes, in her very limbs. The other girls in her dormitory despise her for her reticence; they do not know what she has seen, what she has been.

She makes fair marks at the school, but stays out of sight.

The following summer she returns to the country estate, to the dilapidated old mill. She shies away from the labyrinth, from the memories that drift ghostlike through those ancient pathways. She prefers to spend her time in the woods surrounding the mill, or in the nursery with her brother. She sees very little of the captain, her stepfather. He is away, warring for Spain.

 

The second year is very much like the first. She keeps a diary now, writing in it letters to her brother. It’s silly, she knows; he is still too young to understand what she wants to tell him, but she needs to put it on paper, cut it out of herself as one cuts mold from cheese. She intends to burn the book when she is finished. She doesn’t want to remember these things any more than she would dare to share them with the other girls.

The captain returns that summer to stay. He forbids Ofelia to see her brother, on whom he keeps a close eye, and puts Ofelia to work in the kitchen. It is menial work but not difficult, for the other women pity her and help her when they can. She fears, though, that the captain intends to keep her there forever, so when the leaves begin to turn and he sends her back to the school, she feels improbably glad.

 

So things go for the following years. Ofelia lives in hope that the captain will be called away to war again, leaving her to love her brother as she would. She continues to achieve in school, and in her sixteenth year she is called upon to be a prefect. She accepts, and proceeds more or less successfully in her capacity as a leader.

The girls that once tormented her now avoid her, and this suits her. She will not occupy herself with petty revenge, but aids the younger ones as best she can, remembering how well she would have liked an older student to guide her when she first arrived at the school. One of her charges befriends her, and Ofelia tentatively returns the younger girl’s affection, half-terrified of the prospect of companionship after all these years of solitude.

~*~*~*~

When she returns home that year, the captain surprises her by greeting her personally in the yard, helping her from the big black car. His broad palm against hers sends her into a paroxysm of shivers, and she worries that he can smell her fear, as a shark smells blood in water. His umbrella opens against the rain and he takes her round the shoulders to guide her into the house, sharing his shelter with her as cavalierly as one tosses scraps to a mongrel.

She does not know what to think. Is she now his daughter, or someone else entirely?

 

With a word he promotes her from the kitchen to the upper chambers. She now works alone, keeping fires lit and cabinets well-polished. She is denied entrance only to his study and bedroom; she is glad of this separation, and wishes she were still in the kitchen, slicing the vegetables for the evening stew. His proximity distresses her; he calls for her often to fetch him a drink or polish his boots. He is careless with touch, greeting her with a heavy hand on her shoulder, letting his fingers glance across hers when he takes his pressed neckerchief from her.

She knows he is not a busy man but cannot trust her judgment when she speculates why he insists on her service so often.

Through his study door she hears him teaching her brother the politics of war and her blood curdles. Her brother is five now, a beautiful boy with his mother’s curls and demeanor, quiet and unassuming. The captain will excise that sweet soul from him sooner or later, with brutal accounts of glory as his surgeon’s scalpels, pride being the sutures to close up the wound.

Ofelia hates to think about scars.

~*~*~*~

It is her seventeenth year and her first blood has not yet shown. The woman who tends the wash tells her not to worry, she’d started late too, and she should enjoy her freedom while it lasted. But Ofelia remembers her mother staggering at the end of her bed, dripping with red, hand shaking as she reaches out to her horrified daughter – and she knows she will never let this happen to her. Her first blood has not yet shown, because she will not let it.

~*~*~*~

She finds time for simple pleasures among the other servants in the captain’s house. The summer’s night air lifts the spirits of the women in the kitchen, and they spend the dinner hour tossing gossip and witticisms back and forth until Ofelia, who still dines with them often, nearly weeps from laughing. Even later that evening, when the women have gone home and the captain calls for her, she cannot control the vivacity in her expression, cannot check the blaze in her eyes. She curtsies in the door, and perhaps the subtle irony of the courtesy does not escape him; after a moment’s assessment of her figure, he sends her to fetch a bottle of alcohol.

When she returns, he takes her wrist with one bare hand, turns it pale-side up, gently kisses the blue vein running there. She barely breathes as he reels her in, one arm threaded around her waist, his breath hot and sour on her face. His lips are cold against hers. They chill her cheeks and throat.

Her bewilderment makes her pliant, and he ceases his assault just before she can manage to gather her wits. He dismisses her indifferently, and she stumbles from the room in a haze, her thoughts going round like moths at a lamp. They spin crazily, slipping dangerously closer to the deadly concentric brilliance with every moment. She returns to her room and shuts the door, her hand over her quivering mouth, desperate for oblivion.

Sleep does not relieve the sickness in her self.

~*~*~*~

He continues his pursuit of her over the course of the next seventeen days. Did she not perpetually feel hunted, she might marvel at his restraint, how he barely looks at her one day and attacks her with the sudden swiftness of a viper the next. She wonders if he means to unbalance her, or whether he just doesn’t care half the time.

She becomes well acquainted with the feel of his mouth against her skin, the heat of his hands upon her. At times she protests; at others her body is simply too exhausted to battle his unrelenting advance. Sometimes she thinks the captain is waging war on her, his body against hers, and it is only a matter of time until she surrenders to his siege.

She fights him the first time, using every weapon at her disposal, but he desecrates her temple with overwhelming force. He leaves her alone in her tainted bed, spread and gasping like something wanton, and somehow he knows she will not speak of this to anyone.

The morning after, her heart wells with terror and revulsion when she sees the blood on the sheets. The wash woman offers her congratulations and the others in the kitchen celebrate for her. She leaves hastily to be horribly sick.

In these first few weeks, she learns more about her own body than even he does. She discovers a love for those parts of herself to which she never paid much attention before; his censure of her bodily flaws spurs her on to a passionate but silent defense of them. He cannot abide her knobbly knees, and so she feels for them a quiet and intense fondness. _My knees and I must band together,_ she tells herself, and if he does not approve, all the better.

He tells her, _Your hair is not fine, as your mother’s was. It is rough as Mercedes’._ And she knows the truth now, and will not allow herself the luxury of tears in the dark of her used, empty chamber.

 

He is a monster, yes, but his worst offense is not his cruelty but his love. In the beginning, when he took as he pleased with no thought for her pleasure, she could hate him with every pore of herself, loathe his animalism utterly. But as the weeks become months his touch grows more considerate if not gentler, and his words change as well, so that sometimes she can believe that he is falling in love with her.

And when he first brings her over the edge, she can’t hold back the scream that escapes her, so different from the other cries she has made in his bed. She can’t hold it back any more than she can suppress the humiliation as the smile crosses his lips. _Slut,_ he calls her, his viciousness surfacing at last, and she can’t help but wonder: if a woman is a slut, why is the man still but a man?

~*~*~*~

She returns to school that autumn as another girl. Not a woman, for her womb is still dry as stones, but a different creature entirely – a thing of cobwebs and dust, dark ceiling corners and darker doorways, closed windows and broken glass. She feels less than the sum of her parts, mere portions of a puzzle assembled sloppily on a board, with too many pieces missing to create a comprehensible whole.

This is her last year at the boarding school, and she creeps from class to class like a dormouse, lapping up the relative freedom like a last meal. She does not know how she will live the following summer and all the myriad days after. Her imagination, once so elastic in her childhood, now hesitates to stretch even to thoughts of simple survival. She cannot imagine her life even two years from now; she knows that if she must endure one more year of this slow torture, she will die.

He calls her home for Christmas, and she feels as if she is falling down a well.

 

The captain holds her closer in the cold of the winter, sometimes keeping her in his chamber from sundown to sunup, and longer when the servants are at mass on Sundays. He spreads her out on his bed, arranging her unresisting limbs like a child might a doll, and his hands smooth down her prickling flesh with all the tenderness of a true lover. She can see her reflection in the mirror across the room – her body coltish and pale against the dark of the bedspread, her small bare breasts sagging against her ribs, dark hair fanned in a thick cloak beneath her white shoulders. The down between her thighs is like a smudge of soot, and her lips are swollen and red from his kisses.

He lies next to her, spent and drowsing, his hand limp on the hard flat place between her breasts, and she will not cry. She will not cry.

~*~*~*~

At the end of the school year she receives an invitation from her friend, whose parents wish her to visit their stylish city home. They think it is very smart for their daughter to have befriended such an intelligent older girl, and Ofelia’s gratefulness for their hospitality and her hope for escape exceeds her sense, and she accepts.

She slips away from reality in the kind arms of her friend, only to be rudely awakened not two days into her visit by the captain, who sends his man with the car to pick her up. When her friend’s parents express their confusion, the chauffeur tells them that Ofelia’s young brother is dead. Ofelia wilts with grief, not even bothering to pack her bags before going unquestioningly with the man.

The captain does not greet her outside on her return, and she runs through the house, ignoring the surprised greetings of the servants. In moments she arrives at his study. She slams into the room, finds him sitting there calmly at the desk, and across from him is her brother, his dark curls crowning his head, his cheeks red with life.

She cannot cry out. The captain stands, his face impassive, and tells the boy to go down to the kitchens for lunch. No sooner than the boy shuts the door behind him does the captain slam Ofelia up against it, his brutal arms holding her immobile against the unforgiving wood.

_Run again, and I will shoot you,_ he tells her, and heedless of the presence of the others in the house, he takes her violently.

 

He resumes his cruel reign over her fading body, marking her with bruises and worse. His anger at her deceit lasts for almost a month, and he does not gentle with her for another two weeks after that. But in this time of enslavement Ofelia has devised a plot, or the foundations of one, and she slowly starts to implement it.

 

It begins slowly. One evening, after she brings him his alcohol, he takes her onto his lap to kiss her. She responds by hesitantly twining her arms about his neck, and when he stops to look at her in surprise and suspicion, she extricates herself, glancing away with a genuine flush burning in her cheeks. At this reaction the captain smirks, takes her hands, and places them on his shoulders before inclining to kiss her again.

She seduces him surreptitiously, using everything she has learned about his body and his tastes to her advantage. She swallows her pride and the nausea and comes to him of her own accord. His hunger for her flesh increases tenfold over the following months, and she endures him barely, but lets him see only equal hunger for him, thinly veiled with an innocent’s blush. He likes her blushes; he delights in the irony of a modest slut.

 

How much time passes? She cannot wait too long. She knows exactly how she wants to do it, and where. She will do it before the cold comes.

~*~*~*~

She convinces him to let her take him on a picnic in the woods, though he almost declines when her brother insists on coming. She makes a promise or two to regain his approval and he follows her into the forest. Summer has reached its zenith here; the bright grass and the trees thick with their lush foliage seem to breathe with them as they walk up the steep hill to the clearing.

_Not here_ , says Ofelia. _Just a little bit further._ The captain humors her. Her brother is getting tired and whines, but they ignore him.

The old fig tree is dead as the first time she saw it; deader, even, as the bugs no longer crawl inside. Its splitting gray trunk is strangely sterile amid all this summer life. _Here,_ says Ofelia, spreading the blanket. They sit down with her, letting her deal with the basket. The captain removes his jacket in the day’s heat. Her brother catches a grasshopper; he has heard that if one removes the head and inserts a twig or a blade of straw into the throat, the insect will continue to leap about. He begs his father to sharpen a twig for him.

As Ofelia digs through the picnic basket she stops. _Oh dear. I left the cold cuts at home. Brother, will you go fetch them for us? You know the way back._ Her brother fusses, but Ofelia glances at the captain from the corner of her eye and he orders the boy to go back immediately.

The boy disappears from sight and Ofelia climbs into the captain’s lap. _Quick,_ he says, his eyes sparking like a greedy fire. _You must be quick.  
He’ll not return soon,_ Ofelia smiles at him, and pushes the captain back on the blanket.

He trusts her, and so is easily distracted. Smiling down, she takes his thick wrists in her hands, pinning them back against the blanket above his head. He laughs, but he humors her and does not resist the delicate restraints of her fingers

She crouches over him, fingers working as she kisses him, her long hair a shroud around his face. The knife he had used to sharpen the twig glints only a hand’s breadth away; while he gasps into her mouth, her unoccupied hand creeps across the blanket to take the knife in a white-knuckled grip.

His next gasp comes of surprise and not pleasure, and then he stops breathing. She does not; her hot breath rushes against his quivering lips, excitement coursing through her. The cold point of his knife digs into his armpit, inches from his heart. She has not yet broken the skin, but it is only a matter of time, and words.

But now that the moment has come, she has nothing to say to him. She only knows she must do this quickly, before he regains his composure. She does not avert her gaze from his as she pushes the knife almost gently into his flesh; it cuts through the cloth of his shirt and slips between his ribs silently. Blood boils forth from the wound, and he finally sighs, his breath mingling with hers.

She has never killed someone before, and when his hands flutter against her waist she jolts in fear that she has not wounded him as well as she would like. But even as she watches him his breath brings blood to wet his dry lips, and she knows it is finished, or nearly so. She feels a dampness on her right knee; she looks down to see the picnic blanket marred with the blackness of his blood.

_You would sacrifice another for your own good,_ he says.

He is wrong. These days she would much less rather live than die.

She doesn’t answer him, but takes the knife from his side, cleans it on her skirt, and without hesitation opens her own flesh. It isn’t like cutting beef for the evening stew or slicing into a potato. The knife’s quick blade blazes through her skin, and she gasps at the pain of it, so much realer than she expected. Her pulse pounds in her ears and she crumples over him, curling up against his prone form.

He summons the energy to turn his head toward her. _Nothing in this life becomes you like leaving it,_ he says, his voice weak yet still deprecating. She wishes she could answer back with a fitting epitaph, but she is weaker than he even now, and he knows it. She sees him manage a reddish smile, and then the breeze summons her away, and she closes her eyes.

~*~*~*~

No one greets her when she reaches the other side. All is cold, and dark. 


End file.
